The Political Economy of Firm Size Distributions

The Political Economy of Firm Size Distributions Evidence from Post-Reform China1 Tarun Khanna & Felix Oberholzer-Gee Harvard Business School August 15, 2006 1. Introduction “As entrepreneurs we are condemned either to being the concubines of state enterprises or the mistresses of multinationals.’ Wu Kegang, Yunnan Hong Wine2 This quote, from an entrepreneur in the People’s Republic of China in 2006, makes clear that the state continues to favor state-owned enterprises and foreign investors, relative to indigenous private enterprise. It could imply that private enterprise is crowded out by the state’s policies, or that private enterprise can exist in (uneasy) symbiosis with state owned or foreign enterprises. Indeed, the saga of private enterprise in China is inseparable from that of the evolution of economic policy. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that the industrial organization literature has largely neglected the role of public policy in a central intellectual strand that runs through this field – the study of firm size distributions. The intellectual pedigree runs from Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon’s early reflections (Ijiri and Simons, 1977; Simons & Bonini, 1958) through Joe Bain (1956),, and on to modern industrial organization theorists like John Sutton (1991, 1998). Yet this literature has almost exclusively focused on technological primitives as the primary, if not the 1 Li Li helped us with sourcing appropriate data. Ramana Nanda provided comments. HBS DOR provided financial support. The usual disclaimer applies. 2 Challenging Change: Why an even fiercer battle hinders China’s march to the market, Financial Times, February 28, 2006, page 11 exclusive, determinant of industrial structure. A recent effort by Cabral and Mata (2003) hypothesizes that evolution of firm size distribution is consistent with a story of the evolution of capital market constraints. But nowhere does political economy enter the picture. In this paper, we argue that this neglect is of first-order importance. The importance of political economy measures is of the same order of magnitude as that of technological primitives and often much larger than that of capital market constraints, at least in our data set comprised of several million observations for a range of organizational forms in two years, 1999 and 2003, a period of massive growth in China. Why is China a sensible research site for studying political economy? China has been a laboratory for social science experiments in the last few decades. The fingerprints of policy decentralization, and of limited convergence, are visible in the considerable intra-China variation which we exploit for identification purposes. We are particularly interested in studying the effects of China’s uneven march to the market on firms of different ownership, namely state-owned enterprises, collectively owned enterprises, foreign invested enterprises, and private firms. The love-hate relationship with private enterprise will be recognizable to any student of China (or any reader of the Financial Times for that matter). It has evolved from thriving private enterprise in the Song dynasty to the first Company Law (Gongsilu) produced by the Qing court in 1904 in the wake of that regime’s embarrassment at China being shown to be economically lagging the west (Kirby 1995), to suspension by Mao Zedong of private enterprise because he was enamored of socialism (1949-1978), and to Deng Xiaoping’s pragmatic re-embrace of any form of capitalism (1978 onwards). Even so, private property rights remain suspect and were only given constitutional legitimacy in 2004. Successful entrepreneurs still have to manage the visibility of their success and remain close to the party. Apparently, several on a ‘rich list’ produced by a British journalist have had to leave China or have been jailed.3 The multiple modifications have demonstrated the fallacy of the belief that the ‘Western model would be the essential vehicle for private Chinese economic development’ (Kirby, 1995, p. 44; italics in original). Our results show that massive liberalization in China has encouraged the growth of foreign- invested enterprises and, to a lesser extent, collective enterprises (including Township and Village Enterprises), but they have never encouraged genuinely private firms. The best thing that can be 3 Ruper Hoogewerf’s list, reported in Face Value: China’s uneasy billionaire, The Economist, February 4, 2006, p.60. 2 said for private enterprise in China is that foreign direct investment, a centerpiece of the China reform model that we review in the next section, appears to spur the entry of small firms. Surprisingly, price flexibility, an important form of liberalization, does not help private firms, though it does help large foreign firms and large collectives become even larger. We are also able to distinguish between government interference directed at provincial insiders (incumbents, if you will) and that directed at potential provincial outsiders (potential entrants, if you will) and show that the effects on the size distribution are opposite. The results are consistent with local governments, in an attempt to protect the autonomy granted them by the center during the reform process, ‘hitting back’ at central government efforts to contain them, perhaps in order to encourage their own local (provincial) firms. This paper contributes to the literature by unpacking the idea of liberalization. Several of the unpacked dimensions do not affect the first moment of the distribution (means and medians), but do affect other parts of the distribution. That is the firm size distribution shifts. Further, the effects we identify, aided by the size of our data set, are precisely estimated and economically large. Politico-economic considerations affect the firm size distribution as much, and often more, than capital market constraints. 2. Literature Review A. China We first provide an overview of relevant characteristics of China’s reform initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 and continuing through the present time. This review reveals that most, if not all, of the institutional constraints believed to be important in understanding China’s growth in this period are neglected by the literature on size distribution of firms. The latter has mostly focused on technological primitives and, to a smaller extent, on variation in the availability of well functioning financial markets. China provides an interesting experimental setting for exploring political economy’s effects on the size distribution of firms because extensive policy experimentation after 1978 has led to big variation across the provinces. Several dimensions of this variation are of interest, notably the extent to which China has attracted foreign direct investment, and the manner and extent to which 3 it has liberalized in different provinces. Also of interest is the view that, despite massive inflows of capital into China via FDI, there has been minimal improvement in productive efficiency in recent years (Young, 2000). Understanding the interaction between the different policy instruments used in China and the effects on firms can help shed light on why this has been so. Liberalized environment Several of our measures seek to capture the extent to which particular provinces have been liberalized. We unpack the idea of ‘liberalization’ in our analysis. The first dimension of liberalization concerns the extent to which prices are set by market forces, as opposed to by planning authorities. The origins of market-based pricing in modern China go back to the advent of the Household Responsibility System (HRS; Lin, 1991) introduced soon after Deng’s reforms began in 1978. They were introduced, at first, primarily in the rural areas, where incentives had been especially stifled following Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Under Mao, private activity had been wiped out, replaced entirely by nationalization and collectivization of all organizations, beginning with the “interim regulations on private enterprises” decree of 1950. HRS introduced market based pricing on the margin. That is, there was a dual track system under which farmers could source inputs and sell outputs on the market, as long as they fulfilled their commitment to the planned levels of output. Lau et al. (2001) argue that the process of reform can be understood as a way of achieving efficiency while compensating losers so that the latter are ‘bribed’ to not oppose the reform process (see also Qian and Laffont, 1999).4 But liberalization can take forms other than market based pricing. In China, part of liberalization was a form of getting the center away from micromanaging enterprise. This decentralization occurred through giving local governments more autonomy, and through providing local officials with the incentives to support business. Support for local enterprise occurred through the fostering of collectives. In China, these were referred to as Township and Village Enterprises (TVE) (Che & Qian, 1998). Property rights were given to the collective unit, rather than the individual, and local officials ran their collective enterprise rather like diversified 4 In the so-called dual track system, enterprises continued to be governed by plan quotas on inputs and outputs, but once these planned inputs were used and planned outputs provided, both at state-determined prices, any surplus transactions were carried out at market prices. Those participating in market-mediated transactions were, by definition,

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